Southern-fried swamp horror with a nice touch of late '50s sleaze. Low-budget yet reasonably well made. A good cast features Yvette Vickers in a supporting role. Although she only made five movies, she still is my favorite screen floozy. The guy in a giant leech suit is fun - but then, have you ever known a guy in a giant leech suit who wasn't fun? Besides, he gets to hang out with Yvette in a dark cave. The print is no better than watchable, but it's the same one I've seen for the past twenty years. So it may be the only one that survives. Will it ever be restored? Don't hold your breath. CAST NOTE: You also can catch Yvette Vickers vamping up the sleazy tart act in "Attack of the 50ft Woman." (1958), which still seems to be in copyright and widely available.

Thank you for that date correction. The credits look pretty fuzzy to me so I double checked with the Internet Movie Database (IMDb.com) and according to them it's 1959. It kind of looks like that in the credits, too, but it's hard for me to tell, it's so fuzzy. So I'll go with IMDB, they're pretty accurate.
Thank you for alerting me to this! :)

I believe the release date of this movie was 1958 rather than 1953. You can read the date in Roman numerals during the opening credits.
I saw this and many of the other sci-fi movies on this site at my local theater during the 50's and 60's when the Saturday afternoon matinee still ruled. You could often see 3 (or even more!) of these cheesy clunkers for as little as a nickel to 15 cents at most. It's truly amazing to be viewing them again...coming through my phone line into my high powered PC in digital form...more than 50 years later.
This is one of the better examples of the genre.

Great flick! Actually this film although campy and Cheesy was very typical of 1950's Sci-Fi. At the time in our history people were terrified of nuclear weapons and I do mean terrified. I didn't realize how on edge people were until the Cuban missile crises. I was in elementary school at the time and my teachers were panicking and crying at the news. 1950's films often show our uneasiness with the nuclear age. The giant ants in the movie "Them" and the many giant Spider flicks. Then there were drama films like "On The Beach" 1959 and "X-The Unknown." I seems to me while the government and scientists were telling us that nuclear power was a great hope for the future, Hollywood was rife with green radioactive clouds, radioactive monsters, radioactive blobs! Is a a wonder that no one really wants a nuclear power plant in their back yard.